José Manuel Mesías

Andrew Reed Gallery presents The Stream Bed, a solo exhibition of José Manuel Mesías. For this show, the Havana-based artist has compiled works that have been in progress, in his mind, for a number of years. According to Mesías: “these pieces come back to digging in the depths of my personal history and the primordial and formative principles of my persona. I try to explore the archetypes of my subconscious through dreams and images that come from my experience. In addition, many works deal with recent loss.”

The central work of The Stream Bed is also the largest: a double portrait of Mesías’ maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather. These relatives were central to the artist’s upbringing; he credits them with instilling in him key aspects of own personhood. In Mesías telling, his grandmother was the matriarch of the family, a severe but loving figure. His grandfather, meanwhile, was a funny and loose guy, an art aficionado, musician, painter, carpenter, and dandy. José took care of them both at the end of their lives, which subsequently brought him even closer to them. This Hockney-esque double portrait is an idea Mesías initially sketched out more than a decade ago. He was able to take their picture together at a family reunion, but the painting itself never crystallized until now, in the exhibition in which it anchors.

Several works in the show take on a Surrealist quality: the artist sleeps on a couch surrounded by locusts; a procession of thousands of crabs filling a road; a boyish Mesías donning a full mustache in a poster for his missing cat. Again, these paintings are deeply personal and self-aware, probing Cuban literature and linguistics while melding with the artist’s own wit and humor.